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Monday, 19 March 2012

BERLIN, March 17 (UPI) -- The German
government wants to pull undercover informants out of the National
Democratic Party, a first step toward banning the far-right group.
A previous effort at a ban ended with a 2003 court decision that
evidence gathered by the informants could not be used. The interior
ministers of the 16 German states agreed recently to stop using
infiltrators in the party, generally known by its German initials, NPD,
Deutsche Welle reported.
Only two parties were banned in the post-World War II era in West
Germany and none in Germany since reunification. The Socialist Reich
Party, a successor to the National Socialist or Nazi Party, was banned
in 1952 and the Communist Party in 1956.
Critics describe the NPD as a neo-Nazi organization. In 2006, NPD
members in the state assembly in Saxony protested a decision to hold a
moment of silence to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the
Auschwitz concentration camp but not to mark the 60th anniversary of the
bombing of Dresden.
Pressure for a ban has also grown since a series of killings of nine
immigrants and a police officer was blamed on a neo-Nazi gang. But
investigators have not been able to prove a strong connection between
the gang and the NPD.